Preventive Veterinary Medicine

Preventive Veterinary Medicine is one of the leading international resources for scientific reports on animal health programs and preventive veterinary medicine. The journal follows the guidelines for standardizing and strengthening the reporting of biomedical research which are available from the CONSORT, MOOSE, PRISMA, REFLECT, STARD, and STROBE statements. The journal focuses on:

• Epidemiology of health events relevant to domestic and wild animals;
• Economic impacts of epidemic and endemic animal and zoonotic diseases;
• Latest methods and approaches in veterinary epidemiology;
• Disease and infection control or eradication measures;
• The "One Health" concept and the relationships between veterinary medicine, human health, animal-production systems, and the environment;
• Development of new techniques in surveillance systems and diagnosis;
• Evaluation and control of diseases in animal populations.

The journal encourages the submission of clinical and field-trial studies, particularly those related to new vaccines and other preventive measures. These studies, however, should follow the Consort Statement (http://www.consort-statement.org) or Reflect Statement (http://reflect-statement.org).

Prevalence studies may be considered for publication, but only if the results are likely to be of international interest (i.e. it must be possible to generalize the findings using scientifically based approaches). For these studies, key considerations in the review process will include (but are not limited to): consideration of both animal-level and herd-level demographics in the sampling design; the study population's relevance to the authors' described target population; the potential for confounding; and how well the sample-size justification assures high precision. The sensitivity and specificity of non-perfect tests used must be declared; the true rather than the apparent prevalence must be presented.

Submissions of reviews of relevant topics are also encouraged, but these should follow the systematic-review process addressed by the guidelines in the following two websites: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/283/15/2008; http://prisma-statement.org.

Preventive Veterinary Medicine does not publish studies on experimental development of diagnostic assays without the appropriate field evaluation. Guidelines for the evaluation of diagnostic assays are followed in the review process (http://www.stard-statement.org)).